Comment on Plex got hacked.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 15 hours agoNot entirely
Firstly you don’t “generate hashes until there is a match”. You can generate hashes until the end of the universe and you’ll still have only a fraction of all possible hashes.
What typically is used are large lookup tables with hashes from known passwords. You can then take that table, take a hash you got, and look it up.
So firstly, hashes should be salted, and if salted correctly, it’s already extremely much harder to use because these tables no longer work. There are few more things you can do but that pretty much is a hard wall already.
The problem is that many corporate systems out there have horrible security. They either use a hash that has been known to be broken since a long time ago (hello LinkedIn), don’t use salting (hello linkediiiiiinn), or don’t use hashing at all.
It’s because of idiots like these that there are so many accounts with password tables out there
What to do?
Use password managers. Now all your site’s have different, safe passwords and you only need to know one. Use 2FA where possible and supported
moseschrute@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Can you also use a list of common passwords and a ruleset you apply to those common passwords, and then
hash(applyRule(commonPassword)) == compromised hash?AA5B@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’m not entirely sure what you mean but my password manager alerts when the hash of one of my passwords matches one from a dark web data dump, and prompts me to replace it with a newly generated one.
I’m sure it’s not a unique feature
Admittedly I do have a few bad password, a combination of I don’t see how I could care (like a Reddit alt account) and sites that break the password change automation (yeah I’m lazy)
moseschrute@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I wonder how that works. The point of password hashing is to uniquely scramble your password. So userOneHash(“password”) should give a different output than userTwoHash(“password”) even if they use the same password. So your password manager shouldn’t really be able to generate the same password hash since an infinite number of hashes can be generated from the same password.